Telling Compelling and Collaborative Stories with Maps

Associate Professor of Modern Foreign Languages, Mary Anne Lewis Cusato, is delighted to share a co-authored publication entitled “Experiential Approaches to Teaching African Culture and the Politics of Representation: Building the ‘Documenting Africa’ Project with StoryMapJS” with the world.

The article is published in the Journal of Interactive Technology and Pedagogy, while she and Dr. Demerdash-Fatemi, Assistant Professor of Art History at Albion College, explain the project in a presentation recording, posted to YouTube. Last but not least, the site she and their students created can be found at sites.owu.edu/documentingafrica.

Here is a summary of the piece: “In this article, Professors Lewis Cusato and Demerdash-Fatemi show how connecting their courses on immigration and African art through an active, experiential, creative, collaborative culminating project, namely the digital platform called ‘Documenting Africa,’ built with StoryMapJS technology, proved a particularly effective approach for students to satisfy the learning objectives for each class and grapple with those questions at the heart of the courses. In addition, the piece explains each course’s assignments and learning individual objectives individually, united through overarching philosophical underpinnings and objectives.”

Check it out!